Pinehurst: One Year Later

By Lee Pace

The infamous “church pew” bunkers and the greens racing at 15-plus on the Stimpmeter are locked and loaded for the 125th U.S. Open Golf Championship at Oakmont Country Club outside Pittsburgh June 12-15.

Can it have been one full year since the eyes of the golf world were upon Pinehurst and Bryson DeChambeau’s miracle bunker shot in the last Open?

Where has the time gone?

DeChambeau reflected in April on the magnitude of his victory on Pinehurst No. 2 last June 16th, that 55-yard sand wedge he hit to four feet on the 18th hole, draining the putt to hold off Rory McIlroy by one shot.

“I never thought it would be me to have that shot, that opportunity to get up and down out of that bunker to win the U.S. Open at that 1,000th USGA championship on the 25th anniversary of Payne Stewart,” DeChambeau marveled. “Why me? Why was it me? I may never know, but I’m honored to be a part of history.”

The history of Pinehurst and the Sandhills continues to evolve in the afterglow of the 2024 Open, the fourth held on No. 2 with four more on the calendar given Pinehurst’s designation by the USGA as an “anchor site” for the national championship.

There’s a statue beside the clubhouse at Pinehurst of Payne Stewart as he made his historic putt in 1999 to win Pinehurst’s inaugural Open.

And today there’s a plaque beside Bryson’s bunker to commemorate his exemplary stroke. Now everyone playing the home hole on No. 2 examines the plaque — and maybe even tries that bunker shot themselves — and has their photo taken with the “Payne Pose.”

“It comes to me quite quickly watching Payne Stewart hitting that putt, 15 feet up, and me watching that as a kid growing up,” says DeChambeau, who was prompted to follow in Stewart’s footsteps as a collegiate golfer at SMU. “That inspired me to play a great game that we all love.”

That passion surely engulfs this community that boasts some 40 courses in a 15-mile radius and dates to the late 1800s when James W. Tufts of Boston established a winter outpost just a day’s train ride from frost-bitten New England. A Scotsman named Donald Ross was hired in 1900 to run the golf operation and within two decades had built 72 holes at Pinehurst in the mirror image of what he knew from the sandy, wispy ground of Scotland.

“Pinehurst was absolutely the pioneer in American golf,” Ross said. “While golf had been played in a few places before Pinehurst was established, it was right here on these sandhills that the first great national movement in golf was started. Men came here, took a few golf lessons, bought a few clubs and went away determined to organize clubs.”

And they’ve been coming now for more than a century.

Among the draws to the Sandhills the last 12 months have been the initiatives of new owners to burnish and refurbish the golf offering and infrastructure at one facility north of Pinehurst that’s been around for half a century and another south of town that opened in 1991.

Woodlake Country Club was designed by Ellis Maples and opened in 1971 just outside the town of Vass, the course the cornerstone to a club and residential community built around a 1,200-acre lake.

The club fell on hard times following being ravaged by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but it has been resurrected by the family of Fayetteville businessman Keith Allison. Golf architect Kris Spence directed the restoration of the course which had become overgrown without any maintenance. He rebuilt tees, bunkers and greens and recaptured the fairways to great acclaim as GOLF Magazine ranked the course among the best to play in North Carolina. Woodlake opened a restaurant last June, and this summer three pickleball courts and a fitness center will be completed. The private club component now has more than 200 members, and the tee sheet was full this spring with golfers traveling from all over the nation. The course was the venue in late May for qualifying for the Rex Hospital Open on the Korn Ferry Tour.

“We’ve had people who played here 25 years ago come back and say it’s better now than it’s ever been,” says general manager Jeff Crabbe. “We had a great March and then topped that with an even better April. Momentum is definitely growing.”

Three courses riding the momentum of the 1990s golf boom were added to the Sandhills’ golf roster with Legacy Golf Club (designed by Jack Nicklaus II) opening in 1991, Talamore (Rees Jones) the same year and Mid South Club (Arnold Palmer) following in 1994. Talamore and Mid South have been in the same ownership family of Philadelphia-based Bob Levy Jr. for more than two decades, and Legacy was brought under the same umbrella in the fall of 2024.

Now golfers coming to the Sandhills for a long weekend and staying in one of the lodging properties at Talamore or Mid South can play each of the three courses.

“It’s a very good three-course rotation for guests to come in and play,” said general manager Matt Hausser. “We do a lot of three-round, two-night stays. So, we’ve got three good golf courses for the guests to come and play.”

Legacy is located nine miles south of Pinehurst and is noted for the preponderance of lakes dotting the back nine. Since the transaction in September, the new owners are well on their way to a master overhaul that includes new bunkers, bridges and cart paths, planting some 15 acres of sod, clearing underbrush throughout the course, adding two new tees and renovating the clubhouse. Now holes that were suffocated with tree and plant growth have been opened up and provide memorable vistas across the property.

“Legacy has always had great bones, it just got grown over,” Hausser said. “Now the views are so much more dramatic. You see more of the lakes. Before, standing on 14 tee, you didn’t know there was a lake to your right. Now you can see it.”

It makes sense to grow the inventory and improve the quality of the area’s golf offering given the momentum generated in Pinehurst proper with the 2024 Open and the first full year of operation of the USGA’s new Golf House Pinehurst operation.

The USGA announced in December that the Open delivered $242.5 million in economic impact to the state of North Carolina. The report was compiled by Eventcorp and tallied 1,800 jobs connected to the event, with $95.7 million in visitor spending.

The USGA opened its seven-acre Golf House Pinehurst campus nearly a year ago, which now houses its new golf equipment test center, USGA Experience, the World Golf Hall of Fame and 70 full-time employees.

Some 35,000 visitors have walked through the USGA Experience and World Golf Hall of Fame building since its opening in late May 2024. The Museum team launched a programming calendar in Pinehurst this fall, hosting authors, artists and notable players.

Following the announcement in 2020 of the establishment of Golf House Pinehurst and No. 2 being the first U.S. Open Anchor site (with dates set for 2029, 2035, 2041 and 2047), the USGA later added that Pinehurst will serve as the host for six more USGA championships in the coming years. These events include the 2027 U.S. Women’s Amateur, 2032 U.S. Junior Amateur and U.S. Girls’ Junior, 2038 U.S. Amateur, 2044 U.S. Women’s Amateur and a future U.S. Adaptive Open. The 2027 and 2044 U.S. Women’s Amateurs and 2038 U.S. Amateur will be held on Pinehurst No. 2, with the remaining championship’s courses to be determined at a later date.

“We made a promise to North Carolina when we announced not only Pinehurst as an anchor site, but also a permanent office at Pinehurst, that the worldwide golf community would take notice – and the state would benefit for years to come,” said

Mike Whan, CEO of the USGA. “One year in, and we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do together in this golf-rich area.”

The rich just get richer.

The Tom Doak-designed Pinehurst No. 10 has just completed its first year of operation on land three miles south of Pinehurst, and the resort announced in April that the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw are designing a companion course that will be known as Pinehurst No. 11. Together those courses as well as a clubhouse and restaurant and potential lodging facilities in the future will be known as Pinehurst Sandmines.

“At Pinehurst, it’s always been about No. 2, and rightly so,” Coore said. “The addition of No. 10 and 11 will really be positive for Pinehurst. No homes, pure golf, interesting landforms, dramatically different from everything else.”

Pinehurst No. 8 has operated quietly for three decades on land a mile and a half north of the village as a “private club within a resort” experience for guests. Tom Fazio designed the course that opened in 1996 as a tribute to Pinehurst’s centennial year on the best parts of 400 acres of land punctuated by stark elevation changes, pine forests and wetlands.

“No. 8 is the crowning glory for us,” said Pat Corso, the resort president and CEO at the time. “We considered the various things we could do to celebrate our centennial. We thought of the Jubilee Course at St. Andrews and said, ‘Why not build a golf course?’ We needed another golf course.”

The course operated as the third prong of Pinehurst offering guests a three-course rota of premier experiences along with No. 2 and No. 4. It closed in 2022 for a restoration project that included rebuilding all greens (replaced with Tif-Eagle Bermuda) and bunkers and de-thatching the fairways. More than a hundred trees were removed to open up sunlight and airflow, and now from the clubhouse verandaoverlooking the back nine, the visuals open up to the 12th and 13th holes half a mile away.

Odd as it may seem, Pinehurst as a golf resort existed for more than a century without ever offering hotel rooms directly alongside golf holes, as the Carolina Hotel, Holly and Manor Inns were located in the village, a short walk from the golf operation. That has changed with the May opening of the Cottages at No. 8.

Nine cottages tucked into a forest between the eighth, ninth and 10 holes will have opened by the fall (five are available now), adding 52 rooms to the resort inventory. Each cottage has two levels, some with two bedrooms and others with four, and each has a recreation room with a pool table and a common sitting area. Outside are communal fire pits, a pavilion and a large putting green.

Having hungry golfers staying on-site at No. 8 prompted Pinehurst’s food and beverage team to up its game with the opening of a restaurant, creatively named PL8TE. The restaurant was the idea of Pinehurst Chef de Cuisine Michael Morris, who thought the resort needed a dining experience steeped in Southern cooking traditions. Entrees such as pork chops with a Cheerwine barbecue glaze, shrimp and grits with roasted succotash and pecan-pie cheesecake certainly fit that bill.

“There was really no outlet at Pinehurst to promote local, Southern cuisine,” says Morris. “I wrote a simple, down-home country menu, upscaled with small touches.”

What a year. New golf. New rooms. New dining. A new museum.

All of which prompts speculation and whispers in the Sandhills that the major highways leading into Pinehurst and Southern Pines are due for widening over these four years leading toward the 2029 back-to-back U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open. Indeed, the golf world can’t get here fast enough.

Lee Pace is a freelance golf writer who has written about Sandhills area golf for four decades and is the author of club histories about Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Forest Creek.